Enacting Brittany by Young Patrick;

Author:Young, Patrick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Tourist Claim on Costume

Tourist organizers and tourists themselves had to grapple as well with the realities of change in Breton costume in the twenties, and more acute concerns over its value, as it was worn and deployed in new ways. Within a much changed tourist commerce in the region, costume still resonated powerfully as a symbol of Breton traditionalism and cultural originality; but securing its value within a more mediated cultural field could be an uncertain undertaking, and one that often required greater work than in the past. For their part, tourist conditioning texts continued actively to sustain tourist fantasies of undisturbed Breton cultural possession and transmission with regard to costume, as they had since the nineteenth century. Katherine MacQuoid suggested in her 1877 travel account that the value and expense of Breton costume led its wearers to store their outfits away in carved armoires for most of the year, bringing them out only for special occasions. Thus did they manage to preserve and transmit both the costumes themselves and the larger tradition of which they were a part across successive generations.66 That description found its echo nearly sixty years later in the 1929 Ward Handbook for English travelers, which resorted to even more elaborate narrative conceit to assert Breton continuity in dress and culture. The guide acknowledged that the pardons and other festive occasions were really the only place where a tourist could any longer view Breton costume authentically, but offered a strangely emotive (for a guidebook) description of an archetypal pardon from the imagined perspective of a peasant participant, with particular attention paid to the enduring and evocative power of Breton dress:

… when the day of the Pardon comes round, with indescribable joy he dons his best clothes, which may have been those of his grandfather, and off he goes. It may be that it is he who, as the strongest man in the parish, will carry the banner, and that is something worth living for. If he has a daughter, she may be one of the communicants, dressed in white raiment trimmed with Breton lace which has been handed down from generation to generation. The sight of her will be an additional delight for him and for his wife, whose daily lot is at least as hard and as drab as her husband’s, and with pleasure even greater than his will she seize the occasion to lay aside her poor workaday clothes and put on her treasures, kept in the family chest under the closed-in bed.67

Even as it was by this point offering growing ranks of outsiders a readier access to it, tourism was also still producing Breton costume as a marker of stable cultural value. It is indeed revealing that the guidebook offered in this description a moment of authenticity unavailable to the reader-tourist, or to the peasant himself for that matter, in everyday life. The inclination to cast tourist access to Breton costume in terms of intimacy and integrity remained strong, though the encounter with it was far less a privileged one than had been the case in the past.

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